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LaTeX Workshop vs AUCTeX: catalog facts
LaTeX Workshop	AUCTeX
Free Free and open source under the MIT licence.	Free Free software from the GNU Project.
Windows, macOS, Linux	Windows, macOS, Linux
Auto build with configurable LaTeX recipes Internal PDF viewer with SyncTeX	Supports LaTeX, ConTeXt, Texinfo, AMS-TeX and docTeX preview-latex shows formulas as images in the source
Requires Visual Studio Code and a separately installed TeX distribution Latest version needs a recent VS Code release	Requires GNU Emacs and familiarity with it Needs a separate TeX distribution to compile documents
Downloadable app	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License: MIT	License: GPL-3.0-or-later
No account needed	No account needed
Works offline	Works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 2, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 2, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.